Summer of 2005 – most students had gone home for the holidays, and the UoY campus was quiet and serene. As I had landed the bursary that would support a month-long internship with the Behavioural Neuroscience lab, I needed to find somewhere to live on campus for the summer. I had to move into a different room in the halls of residence located in the far corner of the university, far away from my usual halls next to the ponds and geese and ducks* on the main campus. (At the end of every academic year, we moved rooms though would remain within the same halls. So before people went away for the summer break, they would pack up their stuff and put them in storage.)

There weren’t many people in the house that summer (if memory serves, it would have accommodated 10-12 students during the regular academic term). I would wake up, shovel down some breakfast, pack a simple lunch, and walk 10 minutes over to the Psychology building to start the day. It was a generous bursary, given that initially I was mostly entering data, making sure the animals were fed and watered, and not really doing too much heavy-lifting. There were at least four PhD students in the lab and one post-doctoral fellow, and I eventually began to run some experiments for them as well.

The corridor from the main department leading up to the lab was as nondescript as one could imagine, and the door opening up to the lab was solid, without any slit or window, with a bold “Behavioural Neuroscience Laboratory” sign across it. But behind this door laid one of the most fascinating places I had ever been in at the time. There were Sprague-Dawley rats, laboratory mice, and even pigeons. Yes, pigeons, who lived in a spacious aviary and would sit docilely in my hands after I managed to coax them down from their perch. And there were all these weird and wonderful contraptions that I had only seen in pictures in my textbooks, such as the Skinner box (the famous B. F. Skinner operant conditioning chamber). It was an entire standalone ecosystem, and I felt so fortunate to have been granted access**. I learned so much, and found out how incredibly intelligent our furry and feathery friends are. The pigeons pecked the heck out of the screen in the Skinner box whenever the green light came on, and they were of course rewarded with yummy treats. They knew to do nothing in response to the red light. I learned how to weigh rats and mice, and how to transport them in their cages without getting bitten***. There was even a reptilian friend tucked away in a corner of the lab. And s/he**** is the star of my next post.

By then I had struck up a good working relationship with people in the lab, which was of course another important soft skill that I acquired. I did mess up massively once though. I managed to somehow overwrite one of the PhD student’s data on the computer, by resetting the recording linked to an experimental device without checking that the previous data set had been downloaded. I remember how upset she was, how she yelled at me in front of everyone, how horrible I felt, and how I then went to the toilet to cry my eyes out. I also remember how terrible she felt when she found out I cried, how we made up, and how she gave me a big hug in the room with the rats. These interactions and soft skills (e.g. like duh, do not erase other people’s data) are not tangible points that you can capture in a CV or resume. These are lessons that have stayed with me over the years, most poignantly forgiveness and kindness.

Just to digress a little, apart from this internship, I had volunteered during my second  year (I think) with another lecturer/researcher whose area of expertise was in cognitive and experimental psychology. In particular, he was interested in attentional control. I ran experiments for him – basically that involved receiving participants, starting the experiment on the computer for them so that they could click away at crosses on the screen, signing them out, and then logging the data. I recall thinking how dry the subject matter was, and indeed the researcher himself had told me as much. Now that I am a neuropsychologist, I can totally appreciate the contributions of cognitive and experimental psychology to the field.

So anyway, I completed my internship at the animal lab. It was an amazing experience, not just because of the things I learned, but also what it led to eventually. I ended up doing my final year dissertation with the professor in-charge of the lab, and that is a whole nother story on its own, in Part 3 The Finale. But you already kinda know what it’s going to be about. 😉

Before I round up this post, I want to talk a little bit about the literature survey I did in my final year. It was what they called a library project, resulting in a write-up of 4000 words (if memory serves). It was worth 20 out of 120 credits for the academic year (see previous post), i.e. pretty substantial. In this work, I decided to look into whether there was any merit to the maleficence long attached to being left-handed (the word “sinister” comes from the Latin word for “on the left hand side”). I have always been attracted to offbeat topics and enjoyed intellectual forays off the beaten track, so I explored this subject matter with relish. I got a grade of 72 for my efforts, and that really put me on track (I underperformed in my first 2 years, as per my previous post).

I’ll be talking about my dissertation next, which was the icing on the cake.